Author Archive

The Wonderland Book Awards are a recognition presented annually at BizarroCon for superior achievement in bizarro fiction writing. Voting for the Wonderland Book Award preliminary ballot begins now for the Best Bizarro Novel and Best Bizarro Collection of 2017. Please send your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place votes in the Novel and Collection categories to bizarrocon@gmail.com with the subject line “Wonderland Book Award Preliminary Ballot.” Preliminary voting ends November 10, 2018.

NOTE TO AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS: Please do not solicit or campaign for votes.

BEST NOVEL
4 Rooms in a Semi-detached House by Madeleine Swann
A Confederacy of Hot Dogs by Christoph Paul
An Augmented Fourth by Tony McMillen
Bad Hotel by Dustin Reade
Beetle Brain by Kevin Strange
Die Empty by Kirk Jones
Deadly Lazer Explodathon by Vince Kramer
Death Metal Epic (Book Two: Goat Song Sacrifice) by Dean Swinford
Death Pacts and Left-Hand Paths by John Wayne Comunale
Drag Queen Dino Fighters by MP Johnson
Embry Hard-boiled by Michael Allen Rose
Exercise Bike by Carlton Mellick III
Girl in the Glass Planet by S.T. Cartledge
Hate From the Sky Sean M. Thompson
Home Is Where the Horror Is by C.V. Hunt
Human Trees by Matthew Revert
I Died in a Bed of Roses by Kevin Strange
In the River by Jeremy Robert Johnson
Itzá by Rios de la Luz
Liquid Status by Bradley Sands
Made For Love by Alissa Nutting
Mud Season by Justin Grimbol
Parasite Milk by Carlton Mellick III
Sip by Brian Allen Carr
Spermjackers From Hell by Christine Morgan
Spider Bunny by Carlton Mellick III
Tenderbear Goes Apeshit by Bix Skahill
The Big Meat by Carlton Mellick III
The Heartbeat Harvest by Mark Jaskowski
The Long Night of the Eternal Korean War by G. Arthur Brown
The Night Manager by Jeff O’Brien
The Orphanarium by S.T. Cartledge
The Warblers by Amber Fallon
Transgemination by Glenn Gray
This Town Needs a Monster by Andersen Prunty
The Unyielding by Gary J. Shipley
White Trash Gothic by Edward Lee

BEST COLLECTION
Angel Meat by Laura Lee Bahr
Chupacabra Vengeance by David Bowles
Come Home, We Love You Still by Justin Grimbol
Gravity by Michael Kazepis
Help Me Find My Car Keys and We Can Drive Out! by Jon Konrath
Is Winona Ryder Still with the Dude from Soul Asylum and Other Lurid Tales of Terror and Doom by Douglas Hackle
Love For Slaughter by Sara Tantlinger
Moon Snake by Kirsten Alene
Now That We’re Alone by Nicholas Day
Slices by Scott Cole
The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook by Maxwell Bauman
The Raven’s Table by Christine Morgan
Under the Shanghai Tunnels and Other Weird Tales by Lee Widener

BEST COLLECTION
The Art of Horrible People by John Skipp
Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon by Cameron Pierce
Strategies Against Nature by Cody Goodfellow
Midnight Earwig Buffet by Andrew Goldfarb
The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert by Rios de la Luz

We’d like to give honorable mentions to the titles that came close to placing on the final ballot. These titles are: Texas Chainsaw Mantis by Kevin Strange, Cattle Cult Kill Kill by MP Johnson, Jigsaw Youth by Tiffany Scandal, A God of Hungry Walls by Garrett Cook, Clownfellas by Carlton Mellick III, Amazing Punk Stories by David Agranoff, and Rules of Appropriate Conduct by Kirsten Alene

Voting ends October 31st. Only BizarroCon attendees are eligible to vote. Send your votes (one per category) to bizarrocon@gmail.com.

The Wonderland Book Awards for excellence in Bizarro Fiction are presented annually at BizarroCon in Portland, OR.

Voting for the Wonderland Book Award preliminary ballot begins now for the Best Bizarro Novel and Best Bizarro Collection of 2015. Please send your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place votes in the Novel and Collection categories to bizarrocon@gmail.com with the subject line “Wonderland Book Award Preliminary Ballot.” Preliminary voting ends August 1st.

NOTE TO AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS: Please do not solicit or campaign for votes.

Best CollectionAmazing Punk Stories by David AgranoffBattle Without Honor or Humanity: Volume 1 by D. Harlan WilsonBeautiful Madness by S.T. CartledgeMidnight Earwig Buffet by Andrew GoldfarbOur Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon by Cameron PierceRules of Appropriate Conduct by Kirsten AleneStealing Propeller Hats from the Dead by David James KeatonStrategies Against Nature by Cody GoodfellowThe Art of Horrible People by John SkippThe Night’s Neon Fangs by David BarbeeThe Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert by Rios de la LuzThe Underside of the Rainbow by B.E. BurkheadWet and Screaming by Shane McKenzieYou Might Just Make It Out of This Alive by Garrett Cook

Preliminary voting has ended and the final ballot has been determined. Here are the nominations for this year’s Wonderland Book Awards:

BEST NOVEL American Monster by J.S. BreukelaarDodgeball High by Bradley SandsDungeons & Drag Queens by M.P. JohnsonHungry Bug by Carlton Mellick IIIPus Junkies by Shane McKenzie

BEST COLLECTIONI Like Turtles: The Collected Flashes of G. Arthur Brown by G. Arthur BrownI’ll Fuck Anything that Moves and Stephen Hawking by Violet LeVoitMisery Death and Everything Depressing by C.V. HuntMurder Stories for your Brain Piece by Kevin StrangeStranger Danger by Kevin Strange and Danger Slater

We’d like to give honorable mentions to the titles that came close to placing on the final ballot. These titles are:The Last Horror Novel In The History of the World by Brian Allen Carr, Hell’s Waiting Room by C.V Hunt, Hearers of the Constant Hum by William Pauley III, Our Blood In Its Blind Circuit by J. David Osborne, Creep House by Andersen Prunty and Paramournby John Edward Lawson.

Voting ends October 31st. Only BizarroCon attendees are eligible to vote. Send your votes (one per category) to bizarrocon@gmail.com.

The Wonderland Book Awards for excellence in Bizarro Fiction are presented annually at BizarroCon in Portland, OR.
To register for BizarroCon 2015 please visit http://bizarrocon.com/registration/

Preliminary voting has ended and the final ballot has been determined. Here are the nominations for this year’s Wonderland Book Awards:

BEST NOVELMotherfucking Sharks by Brian Allen CarrBasal Ganglia by Matthew RevertQuicksand House by Carlton Mellick IIIYou Are Sloth! by Steve LoweThe After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone by M.P. Johnson

We’d like to give honorable mentions to the titles that came close to placing on the final ballot. These titles are: There’s No Happy Ending by Tiffany Scandal, Moosejaw Frontier by Chris Kelso, The Party Lords by Justin Grimbol, Death Machines of Death by Vince Kramer, Shatnerquestby Jeff Burk and The Last Gig on Planet Earth and Other Strange Stories by Kevin Strange.

Voting ends October 31st. Only BizarroCon attendees are eligible to vote. Send your votes (one per category) to bizarrocon@yahoo.com.

Lucius Shepard died on March 18th. With deep respect and gratitude, we are reprinting this recent interview with him conducted by friend and mentee, Edward Morris that appeared in Issue #11 of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction published last December.

We asked Morris for a few words by way of introduction and he had this to say:

“Last night, a swath of irrecoverable jungle burned forever, and a Species Of One disappeared for all time. Last night, every light in the city of Vermillion went out at once, and a human door across Time and Space slammed shut.

But the footprints of the jaguar paint the Hokusai rooftops of Montavilla, and the honey badgers come nosing down across Burnside to lie in my yard and moan like dogs who know someone has died.

This dragon, this centaur, this immortal Fabulist taught me to live in the jungle, to love the jungle, to sleep upside-down in trees and eat rats and paint my face with the blood like the VC. To hone our craft to a killing blade.I am amazed to report that we inspired each other, taught each other…and occasionally interviewed each other. Here is the last such drum duet on skulls:”

Fear and Loathing in Portland:

An Unexpurgated Interview with Lucius Shepard

by Edward Morris

I stand in the dark light, on the dark street, and look up at the window of an OMNI stalwart whose work lit the sky for me like a million wishing-stars when I was a boy. I thought then: “This guy gets it. He has seen the landscape of my dreams.”

As I have seen his, too, and more. The inner and outer landscapes Lucius Shepard has traveled contain worlds within worlds within worlds of story, imparted through a certain half-smile that means I Shall Tell You All. Ray Bradbury’s Colonel Freeleigh in DANDELION WINE was described as a human time machine. Lucius Shepard is a human spaceship that can travel in five dimensions at the change of a subject.

I approach the doorstep of the fabulous old sandstone building and think about every building like this that I’ve vacuumed,the things I’ve seen in some basements, the miles of Shanghai tunnel that only slumlords now know…and their former henchmen.

The hidden city, the one called Rose’s City after its most legendary madam, the Portland of opium dens and hobo jungles and poets smoking hash in clean dark windows. The Portland I can see from the fire escape on Lucius’ floor….

Not the first time I have ventured into the strange sunsets of the Lovecraft Housing Blocks just past the Crystal Ballroom. All those mossy old Art-Deco masterpieces with names like the Sara Anne, for blocks and blocks of green-space streets so quiet you can hear the ones who were here before us creeping through their own Shanghai Tunnels, far below the parks in Hoyt Street, a whole civilization blooming from our scraps…

I get in this mood, when I go see Lucius. It’s been almost three years. For part of that, he was out of the country, for part of it he was ill, and for part of it I’m not even going to work my side of the street here.

Lucius’ Portland is a lot more fun. I hear his voice in every trainhopper ghost the Yards ever coughs up in the fog of strawberry spring. He is as Portland as webbed feet. And tonight, as always, the twenty-one-year old me working part-time at the comic book shop, sits up and whistles with a copy of the latest issue of VERMILLION open on the register desk. That kid doesn’t know why. I do.

Lucius buzzes me in, and I walk up three flights of stairs, listening to the song of the antique building in the night, like a ship settling. Outside, the stars turn black, but though his skin is pale and he looks peaked, his eyes are bright and the laugh in his voice bespeaks better health.When I see this, my own eyes grow brighter, and the pen comes out. I’ve been waiting three years for this. Lucius knows it, too.

ROLL SOUND: ROLLING SPEED IN 3,2,1…

INT: What’s the toughest thing you’ve ever written, and why?

LS: VIATOR. I had a complete breakdown. It was difficult to construct, with all those long sentences. The whole book had this sensitivity early on, and it was difficult to get the balance right, to have it anywhere near finished.

Well, eight or nine chapters in, I woke up one day with my serotonin level completely blown. I was this big, gray thing in the mirror. Eventually, I got back on track. But it was a nightmare, and I had to get it out.

INT: What are you working on now?

LS: Due to staggering medical bills I have to get caught up on, I am whoring in Hollywood again. The script I’m working on right now is sort of like ‘Die Hard On The Moon’, if you will. It’s tough. The family has about as much conflict as the family on ‘Lassie.’

I’d written very little before I got well. Writing for Hollywood is different. It suppresses your creativity. Like when they put Barton Fink on a wrestling picture in that movie and said ‘Do that Barton Fink thing…except when I do my Barton Fink thing, it’s always too much and I have to pull back, to make this or that family member less screwed-up, or whatever. It’s very difficult… but I don’t really consider Hollywood scripts “writing.”

INT: I’ve asked similar questions of S.M. Stirling and several other authors placed in the unique position of having the present catch up to their postulated future while they are still alive. When it comes to your breakout 1987 novel LIFE DURING WARTIME, how does the present situation in that region (Mexico, Mesoamerica and South America) stack up against your vision of it?

LS: We got caught up in other wars: The Balkans, the Middle East, and all the rest, but we’re already heading for a war down there. It’s been in the cards for 25 years …Colombia, way back, and all the elements are still in place there, even if everyone’s holding hands and singing Kumbaya because the cocaine trade’s more circumspect than it was under Pablo Escobar. It’s still there. It feels like Detroit in the Sixties when they cleaned up downtown by flushing all the crime out to the suburbs.

The elements are there now in Venezuela, too, because of the oil…There are a lot of serious contributing factors. Violence has escalated in that whole region because, in part, of the American deportation of the guys that became Mara 15. Honduras has one of the highest national homicide rates in the world, and Mexico is off the charts. The cartels…Mara-15 is fast becoming a contender, and the Zetas in rural Mexico as well.

Now, with the gangs, it’s a whole new deal. I started going to Honduras in 1976 but didn’t start seeing these kinds of changes until the late Nineties. George Bush was deporting people to Honduras and elsewhere There were these two brothers in Honduras, gang lords, whose MO was to kidnap an ordinary public bus full of workers and women and kids, have their group call the policia and tell them they did it.

Then they’d kill everyone on the bus. While the cops were thus occupied, more of the group would hijack a dump truck and use it to rob a bank. Thus, one crime with sixty casualties. They out-violenced us. That’s why no one’s really been in a hurry to go to war down there. Makes it less appealing (laughs).

They still hate Americans, and for good reason. You can’t really get a sense of that until you examine the last two centuries of their history. American corporate interests have violated the whole area and made it OUR Balkans. There’s not a lot of love lost.

The whole panoply of events hasn’t worked all the way out yet, but if we get a Republican president the next turn or two, we could get into a high-tech war in Venezuela that would, of necessity, have a lot of infantry /jungle/ war of attrition features like Vietnam. Drones are a little hard to pinpoint in jungle with any accuracy.

In short, the particulars may be different, but the elements are all still there. Waiting. LIFE DURING WARTIME could still happen.

INT: When it comes to graphic novels in general…We’ve discussed this at length before, but for the benefit of the folks just tuning in, did writing VERMILLION kill your taste for wanting to write a graphic novel again?

LS: (Laughs) Depends on how much money I need. That wasn’t a happy experience. The people running Vertigo had good instincts, but not when it came to the direction of the Helix imprint, and that series. For one thing, VERMILLION was *not supposed to be an all-ages comic. That was very stifling.

I was just finding my way. It would have been interesting to truly finish out the arc of that story, rather than write this quick ending because I had to. The experience didn’t kill my taste for that form, but there are only certain reasons why I’d seek it out now. Like getting the chance to adapt another writer’s work into graphic novel form, something like that. Make Me An Offer…

INT: I have a loaded question revolving around your DRAGON GRIAULE cycle. What do you think of the viability of ‘Science Fantasy’ as a sub-genre in the canon, and would you say that any of the aforementioned cycle falls into that sub-genre?

LS: It’s a totally viable sub-genre. Among other Burroughs stories, the UNDER THE MOONS OF MARS cycle is completely Science Fantasy, beam-weapons and all.

Jack Vance was another writer who did Science Fantasy very well. He stands out for me in that genre more than anybody.

INT: Jack Vance is still alive, last I heard. (He died not long later. —ed.) He’s in his nineties. He, Robert Silverberg and William F. Nolan are the oldest living members of that crowd, if memory serves.

LS: Good. He was always one of my three or four favorite Science Fiction authors, and so very much of what he did was Science Fantasy in its purest and often most epic sense.

A lot of times, you could see him really step outside himself, and transcend his own usual forms. You have to remember he was writing on board ship, half the time, back and forth between various ports of call. Writing has always been an honorable profession for merchant seamen because there’s so much down-time. Vance was great Science Fantasy, Cordwainer Smith…

INT: What about Robert E. Howard. Some of what he did—?

LS: Not “Conan.” (chuckles) Never could get into Conan. I almost had a chance to write one of those. Jason Williams from Night Shade Books was putting together a kind of thinking-man’s Sword & Sorcery anthology, but I couldn’t make the stretch to that world. I said that mine would have been something like CONAN THE INTELLECTUAL…

INT: ‘Conan The Librarian.’ Couldn’t resist.

LS: Sure. I don’t know if the DRAGON GRIAULE cycle falls anywhere near there or not. To me, it was just a big, ambitious story, a metaverse. THE SKULL of course took it into the contemporary age, which was what I think you were asking, but even then… Once, I wrote a story in which only one thing was done differently. As though it were the real world, but with a great big dragon, or in another instance, some one thing amplified. I don’t know if that’s still traditional Fantasy, or Science Fantasy by default. It can be tough to call.

THE SKULL was fun. It was written in a lot of different styles. One section, for example, was written in one long sentence. Another section was laid out like a play. The newest is straight-ahead and linear, as much so as I think any of my stuff ever gets, but everyone seems to think they’re all kind of odd. But they seem like normal shit to me. (shrugs) The next books are a collection called Five Autobiographies and a Fiction, and a novel called Beautiful Blood.

*Lucius and I talked a lot longer, of many things. Vast, sweeping, left-field wonderment things, French Metal and half a million recommended movies back and forth. The soul of the land seeping into his bones in Tibet, the Trans-Tibetan Railroad I once boarded in my dreams, and hearing the Dalai Lama exclaim over the airport gift of an Atlanta Braves baseball cap: “Oh, B for Buddha!” Things that light up the soul on the way home, especially when it’s cold and the neon is very far away.

Our conversations usually extend longer than an interview would support, off the page and up the peaks and down the valleys of mountain ranges that extend beyond Madness, into what Kit Marlowe called the literature of the age. That landscape can be found in quiet apartments on nights like this, with no entourage, no DJ, not even backing vocals. Merely the dance of laptop keys whose action gets worked so hard that they stutter out Morse Code to the world. Sometimes, that sound is the only tune we need to Rock and Roll.

Starting with Satan Burger in 2001, author Carlton Mellick III has since become one of the most prolific authors of his generation. His average release schedule is four books per year, with a maximum of six releases in a single year. He has now reached 40 books in print at the age of 35. If he keeps up this pace he’ll break 100 books by the time he turns 50.

“If I thought there was a market for it I could easily write 10+ books per year instead of just 4,” says Carlton. “I am a full-time writer and I write at least 500 words per hour. If I actually worked like a person with a full-time day job, writing 8 hours a day 5 days a week, that would be an output of 80,000 words per month and 960,000 words per year. Since my average word length for a book is 40,000 words, I am theoretically capable of writing 24 books in a year. But that would be a hell of a lot of books!”

Whenever he’s asked if he feels like the quality of his work suffers from having such a large output, he always has the same response.

“Actually, it’s the complete opposite. The more I focus on quantity, the more the quality improves. If I ever write three books back to back in a three month period, the second book will always be better than the first and the third book will always be the best of the three. What does affect quality is stagnation. Never take too much time off between books. Trying to get back into writing after a long break is like trying to get back into shape after a two year fast food binge. It’s not a pretty sight.”

For his 40th book, Carlton chose to write a book about killer mermaids.

“I didn’t know it was going to be my 40th book when I wrote it, I just wanted to write a book about mermaids,” says Carlton. “Yeah, that’s right, I wrote a mermaid book. I wrote it because I think mermaids are awesome. I also think fairies and unicorns are awesome. You got a problem with that?”

MERMAID [mur-meyd] noun — a rare species of fish evolved to resemble the appearance of a woman in order to attract male human prey.

Mermaids are protected by the government under the Endangered Species Act, which means you aren’t able to kill them even in self-defense. This is especially problematic if you happen to live in the isolated fishing village of Siren Cove, where there exists a healthy population of mermaids in the surrounding waters that view you as the main source of protein in their diet.

The only thing keeping these ravenous sea women at bay is the equally-dangerous supply of human livestock known as Food People. Normally, these “feeder humans” are enough to keep the mermaid population happy and well-fed. But in Siren Cove, the mermaids are avoiding the human livestock and have returned to hunting the frightened local fishermen. It is up to Doctor Black, an eccentric representative of the Food People Corporation, to investigate the matter and hopefully find a way to correct the mermaids’ new eating patterns before the remaining villagers end up as fish food. But the more he digs, the more he discovers there are far stranger and more dangerous things than mermaids hidden in this ancient village by the sea.

Like a Lovecraftian version of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Village of the Mermaids is a dystopian mystery that proves once again how cult author Carlton Mellick III brings the weird to a whole new level.